London, June 9. The great parliamentary debate has ended, or 
rather perished because of hypersalivation. Baring’s motion* was 
carried without opposition “amidst the general laughter of the House’. 
The motion, insipid as it is, concludes with a war address to the 
Crown. Did the House declare the war “une guerre pour rire”"? 
Or did it declare itself “une parlement pour rire’? At anv rate, 
the real conclusion of the two-week debate did not he in the 
acceptance of Baring’s motion—a mere formality—but in the 
general laughter, the spontaneous muscular spasm contravening 
the regulations, the indiscreet cry of nature beneath which the 
“honourable House” buried motions and counter-motions, amend- 
ments and sub-amendments, ministry and opposition, speeches, 
counter-speeches, sermons, deductions, shrill] sarcasm and pathetic 
entreaty, prayers for peace and war-cries, tactics and tactlessness, 
itself and its vote. The House saved itself from the laughable 
situation by laughing at itself. Thus it confessed that worid- 
historical] seriousness in this parliamentary medium first becomes 
contorted into conventional seriousness, and this contrived serious- 
‘ness then turns into natural jesting. 

Every attempt to get Palmerston to formulate ministerial policy, 
to make any statement about the object, tendency or purpose of 
the war failed completely. He flatly declared that 

“it was impossible to question a minister, or indeed any friend, about the object of 
the war.’’4 

The Times, No. 22076, June 9, 1855.— Ed. 

It was the peace men that helped him most of all. Do you wish 
to know why we are waging war? There is Richard Cobden who 
wants peace at any price. Do you not prefer war without any price 
to peace at any price? Aim your blows at Richard Cobden! In this 
way he continually thrust Cobden or Bright or Graham or 
Gladstone between himself and his antagonists. _ 

The cotton heroes did not merely serve him as padding to line 
his battle-dress with. More than that. He manufactured gunpow- 
der out of their cotton. It also appeared during the debate that in 
Russell, just as formerly in Aberdeen, Palmerston possesses a 
lightning-conductor for his sacrosanct person, a lightning-conductor 
belonging to the Cabinet itself. It was for this purpose that he sent 
Russell to Vienna, for the purpose of turning him into his 
lightning-conductor. And Roebuck is now declaring Russell 
responsible for the “shortcomings” * of the heroic Palmerston just as 
Layard and Co. formerly did with Aberdeen. The “wingbeats” of his 
“free soul” ” are now impeded by the Russellites just as they used to 
be by the Peelites. He has these weights hanging from him not in 
order to work, like Black Forest clocks, but so as to strike the hour 
wrongly. 

All the cliques of the House of Commons have emerged the 
worse for wear from the conventional mock battle. The Peelites 
have at last admitted that they have hitherto been officers without 
armies. They have given up the pretension of forming a grouping 
of their own and have openly joined the Manchester School. As 
they were entrusted with the leadership of the army and navy 
during the first year of the war they have, by professing their 
belief in eternal peace, foolishly denounced themselves as the 
traitors within the coalition, to the happy surprise of Palmerston- 
Russell. They have made themselves impossible. 

The Manchester School actually want peace in order to wage 
industrial war at home and abroad. They want to establish the 
mastery of the English bourgeoisie on the world market, where 
fighting is only to be permitted with their weapons—cotton- 
bales—and in England itself, where the aristocrat is to be pushed 
_aside as superfluous in modern production, and the proletarian, as 
the mere instrument of this production, is to be subjugated, while 
they themselves, as the leaders of production, are to head the state 
and take over the offices of government. And now Cobden 
denounces a clergyman, Dr. Griffiths, for declaring at a public 

meeting that the House of Lords is superfluous. And Bright weeps 
over the fate of the royal children, who will be obliged by the ruin 
consequent on the war to wash their own shirts. Both denounce 
popular agitation.” Are these the heroes of the Anti-Corn Law 
League,'* who, carried to the top on the waves of popular 
agitation, used to denounce the “barbaric splendour of the 
Crown”, Lords, landed aristocracy, etc., as “false production 
costs”? Their whole point consisted of the struggle against the 
aristocracy, not excepting the peace homily. And now they are 
denouncing the masses to the aristocracy! Et propter vitam vivendi 
perdere causas°” In this debate the Manchester School have 
renounced their raison d’etre. 

As for the Tories, they have discovered a peace party in their 
own bosom and proved that they have preserved their tradition as 
the representatives of English nationalism as little as their hatred 
for the “Bonapartes”’. 

Finally, the ministerial side? Nothing characterises them better 
than their frantic efforts to cling to a motion which Palmerston 
himself had to turn down only a week before, which the proposer 
wished to drop, but which was accepted by Walpole in the name of 
the Tories, by Gladstone in the name of the peace men, and by 
the House in the name of “general merriment”. 

The Morning Herald has received the following communication 
from the Gulf of Finland: 

“16 miles off Cronstadt, May 28. The Orion has been in to reconnoiter, and 
reports that the Russian fleet in Cronstadt consists of six line-of-battle ships, ready 
for sea; six nearly dismantled ones, thirteen apparently fitted as floating-batteries, and 
eight steamers of a large size, besides gun-boats, which could not be counted.” 

“Visited Bomarsund [...] found things exactly the same as they were left, the 
Russians had done nothing to repair the fortifications, we saw neither man, 
woman, or child ... the inhabitants fight rather shy of us, in consequence of the 
Russians having punished a number of them for having traded with the allied 
squadrons last year...”.©